javascript - Why can't you stringify a jQuery object?

Question

The line JSON.stringify( $("p") ); causes an error:

InvalidStateError: Failed to read the 'selectionDirection' property from 'HTMLInputElement': The input element's type ('button') does not support selection.

^{(I'm using Google Chrome 34)}

Why?

How else should I make $("p") more portable so I can store it or pass it in a message?

Answer 1

There's a ton of state (attributes, event handlers, the code related to those, internal state, ...) involved in an HTML element. It just doesn't make sense to serialize all of that into JSON.

If you want to get some kind of representation of the element in JSON, you could for instance use .html() to get a HTML string representing the element. Or come up with a format that encodes, for instance, tag names, attributes and text only. You could have to implement that by hand though (or find a library - "html to json" could be a good keyword)